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Can teachers’ talent translate elsewhere?

Project puts top educators in troubled schools

By ERICKA MELLON
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Sept. 20, 2009

Editor’s note: This is the first story in an occasional series chronicling the experiences of Houston ISD teachers who accepted a $20,000 bonus to transfer to a troubled middle school.

Cheryl Contreras sipped from a large cup of coffee as she waited for her eighth-graders to file into class on the first day of school.

Nerves had kept the English teacher awake the previous night. She's taught for eight years but is new to Fondren Middle School, a southwest Houston campus branded “academically unacceptable” by the state.

“Everyone keeps talking about how it's a little more challenging — the students are tougher,” said the 38-year-old Contreras. “I'm trying not to be negative or scared.”

But the pressure is on this newcomer, who was so successful at boosting student test scores at a middle school across town that the Houston Independent School District offered her a $20,000 bonus to work at a needier campus for the next two years.

Contreras and 18 other HISD teachers are part of a national study that seeks to answer some of the most crucial questions in the public school reform movement: Can standout teachers get the same results from students at troubled campuses? If so, what incentives will draw them there, and will they stay?

Research is clear that schools in the roughest, poorest neighborhoods generally attract the weakest teachers. “Student achievement is at stake,” said Ann Best, HISD's director of human resources.

The Houston school district is one of seven nationwide taking part in this federally funded project, dubbed the Talent Transfer Initiative.

Elementary and middle school teachers in the subjects of math and English were invited to apply for transfers if they ranked among the best at improving test scores.

In HISD, 333 teachers were eligible, and 75 applied for about 20 open spots. The study team with Mathematica Policy Research in Princeton, N.J., plans to survey the teachers to find why they accepted or declined the offer.

Anecdotally, those who balked said they were happy in their current jobs, resistant to a longer commute or worried about the working conditions in the struggling schools, said Steven Glazerman, the study's leader.

Deciding to transfer

Contreras, who worked the past two years at HISD's Marshall Middle School in north Houston, said she was torn about leaving, but the challenge and the $10,000 annually for two years won her over.

“I finally decided that I needed a change and that this was going to be good for these kids and maybe for me as well,” she said.

Nicholas Lopez, another teaching veteran who agreed to transfer to Fondren, had a similar attitude.

“I know that I've achieved a degree of success where I'm coming from,” said Lopez, who has taught for eight years at Hartman Middle School about 15 miles east of Fondren. “Is it the system that's done it for me? Is it something I'm doing?”

Both Hartman and Marshall are rated “acceptable” by the state, while Fondren has fallen short for two consecutive years. All three schools serve mostly poor children.

Fondren Principal Brenda Rangel said she signed on with the transfer project to bring a couple more experienced, proven teachers on board. She had hoped science instructors would be available — that's the school's weakest area — but with the subject not included in the study, the researchers gave her two English teachers. Last year, 82 percent of Fondren's students passed the state exam in language arts, while 45 percent passed science.

“So far, it's been a good match,” Rangel said of Contreras and Lopez after their first month on the job. “The No. 1 thing is rapport with kids and high expectations.”

On her first day at Fondren, Contreras was tough yet tender with her students.

“You will be reading three books every six weeks,” she told the eighth-graders in her advanced English course. “This is a different class than what you're used to.”

The room fell silent, and Contreras continued with her rules.

“When you're writing, I do not want you to write in text message.”

“Do not even look like you're falling asleep, or I will make you stand.”

“You can't talk when you're working, but you can listen to music.”

Contreras, who plays rock tunes on her laptop to lift her mood, next gave the students a quiz about herself.

Q: I have read all seven Harry Potter books.

A: True.

Q: My brother was in a gang.

A: False, but he was shot during a drive-by.

Q: I spent five years in middle school when I was a kid.

A: True.

Contreras explained that she had been a troublemaker. She failed sixth and seventh grades and after getting pregnant, dropped out of school in ninth grade.

“Don't get excited and be like, ‘Awesome,' ” said Contreras, who ended up getting her GED and earning a bachelor's degree in psychology.

“I want to be sure you don't make the same mistakes I did,” she added. “I'm looking for you to go to college.”

Teacher who can relate

Down the hall, Lopez rested his head on one hand during a break between classes.

“I had a very challenging morning,” the 37-year-old said. “I've never had an experience like this — ever.”

Lopez teaches eighth-grade English to non-native speakers. At Hartman, most of the students spoke Spanish. At Fondren, the children hail from all over — Burma, Congo, Mexico, France.

On day one, he spent the start of his classes trying to enforce the dress code. “Camisa,” Lopez said to a Spanish-speaking boy, reminding him to tuck in his shirt.

The students were supposed to write down their class schedules today — an easy task if you know the language — but Lopez's trash bin was filled with wadded-up papers by midmorning.

Like Contreras, Lopez relates to many of his students. At age 7, he moved here from a Jamaican town with no running water. He had to get used to wearing shoes, not to mention learn American English.

To grab his students' attention, Lopez tried a new trick that seemed to work. He said the word “everybody” in a sing-song voice, and they repeated. It's like a game.

By the fourth week, Lopez was making headway with his second-period class, his toughest, with 33 students of different literacy levels.

“We're going to try to get through this a little quicker today,” Lopez said, handing out a worksheet of singular nouns the students were supposed to make plural.

Question 8: What is the plural of “roof”?

“Roofs,” several students said in unison.

“Good job,” Lopez responded. “Y'all did that ‘s' really good.”

Contreras is worried that her first-period advanced class is falling behind. She was out sick three days and had to miss another one for a training session. Several students stumbled on a warm-up assignment last week.

How many syllables are in “relationship”? she asked.

“Two,” a boy guessed.

Contreras clapped her hands to distinguish each syllable, leading him to the right answer: four. The students did better with alphabetical order but struggled with spelling. “Lier,” wrote one girl. “Biologey,” wrote another.

Help from Harry Potter

The principal and staff at Fondren have been “extremely welcoming,” Contreras said, but she has turned to her former co-workers at Marshall for copies of their lesson plans. Her old school also had a better-stocked library.

She already asked Fondren to order Harry Potter books, which she likes to assign at the start of school to hook students on reading and descriptive writing.

“There's so much more than just your teaching ability that goes into your students' (test) scores,” Contreras said. “It has a lot to do with resources. It has a lot to do with academic freedom.”

From the Houston Chronicle...

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Students not the only ones feeling tested

After being given incentives to help school, two educators discover hardships and hope

By ERICKA MELLON
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Jan. 9, 2010

Editor’s note: This is the second report in an occasional series chronicling the experiences of Houston ISD teachers who accepted $20,000 bonuses to transfer to a struggling middle school.

One student cursed in her face. Another stole from her classroom. On top of that, most of her eighth-graders were reading at elementary school levels.

Cheryl Contreras, a seasoned English teacher, is trying hard to rally in her new job at Fondren Middle School, a southwest Houston campus with the state’s worst academic rating.

Contreras was so successful at her old teaching job that the Houston Independent School District offered her a $20,000 bonus to transfer to Fondren for two years. The deal is part of a national study designed to lure talented teachers to struggling schools.

The question on the minds of the researchers and public education reformers: Can great teachers boost student performance at the campuses that need them most?

Ask Contreras that question midway through the school year, and she’s not so sure.

“What scares me is I’m going to fail, and I’ve never failed before,” said the eight-year teaching veteran.

Even some of her top students — those in her advanced English class — started the school year behind.

On a reading-skills test, their scores ranged from a third-grade level to college-ready.

“It’s OK,” she reassured the students. “You have to start somewhere.”

Contreras has until March to prepare them for the high-stakes Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills exam. Those who fail could be retained in eighth grade.

Multilingual dilemma

Down the hall from Contreras, Nicholas Lopez, another English teacher who accepted the transfer bonus, was battling his own problems. He is certified to teach students whose primary language isn’t English, but he is used to mostly Spanish-speaking children.

Lopez’s largest class at Fondren has grown to 31 students who speak Arabic, Farsi, French, Korean, Nepali, Swahili, Tigrinya and Spanish. A tutor from HISD’s multilingual department assists a few days a week, but his schedule is unpredictable, making planning difficult.

On a tough morning this fall, Lopez barely completed a lesson on a single vocabulary word: “adage.”

A new student, an Iraqi immigrant, had just joined the class that day, and Lopez was frustrated with the sluggish attitude and sagging pants of another boy.

Lopez was unable to reach the unmotivated boy’s father but was reluctant to ask an assistant principal for help. Both Lopez and Contreras shared concerns that the Fondren administrators didn’t address discipline problems quickly enough. The teachers felt discouraged from sending their few disruptive students to the office.

“It’s affecting academics,” Contreras said.

Fondren Principal Brenda Rangel said the teachers needed to write referrals for the students causing problems.

“You can’t just send a kid directly to the office,” she said. “We need to make sure we know how to handle them.”

Later in the semester, Rangel relaxed the rules some. During busy times, such as testing or before breaks, she asked her assistant principals to set up “offices without walls” in the hallways. Teachers could send students directly there and follow up in writing in 24 hours.

Pressure builds for all

The entire staff at Fondren is under intense pressure this school year. If the campus earns another “unacceptable” rating — its third straight — Texas law dictates that the principal be removed and that the teachers reapply for their jobs.

English was one of the school’s strongest subjects last year, with 82 percent of students passing the TAKS. This year, the teachers are aiming for an 86 percent passing rate. A practice test in November gave Rangel a big scare. The results showed only 41 percent of the eighth-graders had passed, but the teachers later realized that the test they had designed contained printing errors and flawed questions.

Every six weeks, Rangel meets with her teachers in every subject to review which students are on track to pass or fail the TAKS and which are borderline. She asks for a racial breakdown, too, just like the state rating system.

“We’re spinning our wheels if we’re looking at data that isn’t correct,” Rangel told Lopez and another eighth-grade English teacher at a tense meeting.

Rangel told the teachers to work together more and asked Lopez to stick to the quicker pace of HISD’s standardized curriculum.

“The collaboration is probably the weakest in my all-star team,” Rangel said.

The practice test in December, she added, should be an old, state-released TAKS.

The results, not only more reliable, turned out much better: 75 percent of the eighth-graders passed.

Reason for hope

As the winter break neared, Lopez and Contreras saw glimmers of hope.

Lopez’s problem student with the saggy pants found a mentor in Fondren’s soccer coach, a first-year science teacher named Oscar Romano. Trying to lobby for the boy, Romano showed Lopez a pledge that he had signed listing his three goals: to write English better, to talk better, to read better.

The boy, who emigrated from Honduras when he was in elementary school, came to Fondren in seventh grade.

“It hurt my soul — he couldn’t read,” Rangel recalled, adding that the boy was the inspiration for Fondren’s club for struggling readers.

Last week, Lopez said the boy and the rest of his students seemed more focused as the second semester began. Rangel also greeted him with good news: She was shuffling staff so his oversized class could be split in half.

Contreras was pleased with the improvement she had seen in her students’ writing skills. Around Halloween, she had them write scary stories, and several impressed her with their creativity, plot development and foreshadowing.

But she still questions whether she can repeat the 90 percent passing rates she typically reaches on the TAKS.